Monday, July 22, 2013

K’Sup
1.2

Hello readers, this is the second
edition of K’Sup the Official English Blog of the Krakow Start-up Community. Hope you had a nice week. Last Thursday 18.07.2013, I attended the 16th
Krakow Open Coffee at the Google offices on
Pasaz 13 on the main market square of Krakow.
Open Coffee (OC) is a breakfast event organized by the Hive53 Start-up Collective. They
are the same ones who organized the Summer Swarm last Tuesday. OC is
usually run by; Richard Lucas, the business Angel; Aliaksei Kubei, a
Belarusian Programmer; and Marta Rylko, a student
at AGH. The meeting is usually catered
with good tea, coffee and sometimes muffins. The participants are usually entrepreneurs
running a start-up, business leaders looking for a project to support or people
with ideas looking to collaborate with like-minded people. It is held every other Thursday at
8:00. Participation is free. You just have to bring an open mind or an
interesting idea.

For the first hour, participants are
allowed to make a pitch for their projects, ideas or companies. Everyone who would like to make a pitch or
give a status update is allowed about two minutes for their presentation. Then the second hour, the participants network
to start some collaborations.

I talked to Piotr Nedzyski, who works
at Base a startup dealing with CRM. He is one of the organizers of HackKRK.com. This is an event where programmers get into
teams and try to solve a challenge using different coding languages. The next meeting will pit Python vs. Ruby on
Rails. The event is organized every two
months and it is free. They call it
Web-tech for fun. There are some nice prizes
but the most important prize is bragging rights. The next one is on 25th of July, 2013 at
6pm. He encourages everyone who has an
interest to sign up. I wasn’t able to
get a more clear picture of what kinds of challenges and an example of how some
team were able to solve the problem.
Hope he will share some of the results later.

I also talked to Nich Holden, a games industry entrepreneur and creative director from
the UK. He is currently involved with a
startup called Game
Advocates. They are a group of
volunteers offering „micro-BPO” services to small and creative companies. They will deal with sales, marketing and
bureaucracy aspects of the business so the creative types can focus on what
they do best. At the moment they are
still in the incubating stage. They are
hoping to go live soon. They are looking
for developers of B2B and social network services.

I have been attending OC for a few months now. I believe this is a nice idea. Although it is not the only business-related
breakfast meeting around, what sets this one apart from the others is the
casualness of the atmosphere. They made
me feel welcome from the first meeting.
You did not have to be some big-shot, you just have to want to get
involved. My only criticism is that other
than one or two physical product pitches, most of the presenters are people
connected with the IT or the BPO sectors.
I would like to see a more diversified portfolio of participants. I believe that with more diversity, there
mighht be some possibility of rather unconventional solutions to many
problems. If you know any young business
people of any sector, looking for help or partners or just a job, please
encourage them to attend the OC.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please like me on Facebook.

Search This Blog

An English blog about Krakow Startup

Hello readers, My name is Paul Chen and welcome to K’Sup. My goal is to provide you an English language based blog on the events as well as highlight some of the enterprises who are trying to get their spot on the map as well as to archive the on-going activities at the same time do some trend-spotting. I hope you will find K’Sup both informative and inspirational. The name K’Sup is a combination of K for Krakow and S for start and UP. ‘Sup is colloquial for what’s up in American slang.